As the wicked hand of our long winter finally loosened its grip, people are riding bicycles again. Now I myself am not a “cyclist” strictly speaking, I’m a bike rider; the difference being I own not a stitch spandex of any kind and while I do own a helmet, I’ve never worn it. My bikes themselves also betray a certain proletariat origin in that none of them (I have four) are equipped with any technology or features introduced after 1985 (with the exception of LED lights and some fancy bells). My bikes have solid steel frames, red and yellow reflectors on the spokes, lights, bells, and a couple of them even have rear view mirrors. All my bikes have rear mounted racks with small cargo bags, and I have a nice big saddle bag I can deploy for trips to grocery stores or elsewhere that might require some extra cargo capacity.
I’ve been riding one bike or another for more than 55 years. People like me (and our not too distant cousins the “cyclists”) ride our bikes and dream of a world filled with people like us, riding their bikes on a regular basis, soaking in the peace and freedom of quiet travel. We go to places like the Netherlands, Belgium, or France and marvel at all the bikes and people riding them all over the place all the time. When people like us imagine a bike paradise it pretty much looks like some of these European countries.
We’ve made some attempts in our own ways to create something like a European bike culture in the U.S. but thus far our attempts tend to feel kind of ham fisted, and inadequate. Sure, our numbers have grown fantastically in the last few decades but that pervasive, ubiquitous, bike-centric culture we dream of remains well beyond our grasp and one of our favorite collective past times is to discuss why it is so difficult to establish a proper bike culture in the U.S.?
I was thinking about this very issue, the challenge of promoting a cycling culture in the states, when I took this photo last year.
This is a middle school a few blocks away from my house in St. Louis Park, and as you can see there are maybe seven or eight bikes locked up among what, fifty bike racks? This is a very revealing image that I think encapsulates the “problem” with American bike culture.
Being a primarily white dominated Eurocentric culture with inherent assumptions about design, progress and engineering, we tend to approach cultural issues as objectified engineering problems of some kind. When we try to create our biking paradise the efforts center around designing and building infrastructure; trails, lanes, rights of way etc. We even have people who design buildings that are supposed to promote a bike culture. When we’re not building bike infrastructure we’re creating or modifying new rules and laws; and when we’re not doing that we’re embroiled in territorial disputes with automobiles and pedestrians, and arguing about designs like the proposal for Summit Avenue.
But look at the photo again, there are 1,000 teenagers in that school and only seven or eight of them are riding their bikes. Compare that to this photo of the daily bike parking at the Bruges train station in Belgium.
If we want to understand the difference between European bike culture and our own we need ask why all but seven or eight students in this middle school are getting there one way or another without their bikes?
They have bike lanes and infrastructure in Europe, but that doesn’t really explain the difference. The difference is the profile of riders and role of bicycles in daily life. I don’t think only eight or 10 out of a thousand kids in this junior high are riding because we haven’t built bike lanes for them to ride in.
My generation grew up with bicycles; our bikes played a huge role in our daily lives as children and teenagers. Our bikes were our primary transportation, our pastime and a major vehicle of playtime. We learned to ride at early ages, and we almost never rode anywhere with our parents. We were off … free range and loving it. And there was no cycling infrastructure to speak of. After growing on our bikes we started getting our driver’s licenses and that was for the most part the end of our cycling days. Our culture dictated that we “grew” out of our bikes. Then we made it worse for our children … baby boomer parents decided to hover over their kids like helicopters and letting them ride around on their own didn’t fit that model of parenting. Bikes for subsequent generations of American children became toys in the garage that only came out for family rides, no one would think of riding one to school or the mall instead of catching a ride in the parent’s SUV.
In Europe bike riders in places like Belgium, the Netherlands and France don’t grow out of their bikes. Sure they have cars but the culture never became quite as auto-centric as ours for a variety of reasons. You can’t imagine a scenario in the U.S. like one portrayed in De Sica’s 1948 Italian move, “The Bicycle Thieves,” I think President Eisenhower was already dreaming about our new national freeway system by the time that film was released.
Now I’m not the boss of everyone’s culture, and I’m not really saying we need a European bike culture. But I will say that there are certain benefits. For one thing it’s a little healthier, riding a bike to grocery store, coffee shop or school is certainly a cheap and easy way to get a dose of exercise. It’s also easy on the environment, and a lot safer. We can build all of the infrastructure and sell all the bikes we want; but until we look at our schools and see the bike racks filled with parked bikes we won’t have realized the full benefits of a cycling culture. In order for that to happen we have to figure out how and why parents are discouraging bike riding and how they can encourage independent bike riding.
And then old guys like me can start complaining about all the congestion and telling kids how great the days were when we had the trails practically all to ourselves.
Paul Udstrand is a photographer and maker of observations based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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